Review by Philip Harvey first published in Text, Vol. 29, Issue 1, April 2025. Thanks to the editors Aidan Coleman and Verity Oswin. Kevin Hart ‘Lands of likeness : for a poetics of contemplation’ University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2023 ‘Dark-Land : memoir of a secret childhood’ Paul Dry Books, Philadelphia, 2024 I The copious, sprawling, adventurous Gifford lectures found in Kevin Hart’s ‘Lands of Likeness’ are claimed to be focused in the first instance on contemplation, and then on contemplation and modern poetry. In other words, two of the abiding preoccupations of this author: (1) the primarily religious question of prayer, how we as humans relate to God and the world; and (2) why we turn our language into poetic forms, and why we do that in the context of a world recovering from modernity. However, the lectures chart the altering understanding of the term ‘contemplation’ itself, with strong accent on cultural definitio...
Emily Brontë (1818-1848) Portrait by Branwell Brontë A paper and poetry reading given at St Peter’s Church, Eastern Hill, Melbourne as part of the series ‘Poets and the Faith’ on Tuesday the 13 th of August 2024. “Darkness was overtraced on every face” Darkness was overtraced on every face Around clouded with storm and ominous gloom In Hut or hall smiled out no resting place There was no resting place but one – the tomb All our hearts were the mansions of distress And no one laughed and none seemed free from care Our children felt their fathers’ wretchedness Our homes one all were shadowed with despair It was not fear that made the land so sad The great majority of poems written by Emily Brontë are short expressions of desire, solitude, separation, isolation, hostility, distress, loss, longing, anguish, tempest, hopelessness, suffering. Readers know about these states of being from her novel. It is no secret ...